Science & Technology

Jean-Andre Prager demonstrates the wide-ranging impact of Darwinism. This essay was the winner of the Julia Wood Prize for 2011.

Concorde began regular test flights above Britain 40 years ago this month. Jad Adams looks back to a time when, wracked by industrial decline, a nation embraced the world’s first supersonic airliner.

Lauren Kassell reveals how the casebooks, diaries and diagrams of the late-16th-century astrologer Simon Forman provide a unique perspective on a period when the study of the stars began to embrace modern science.

‘Have the authors of a two-penny weekly journal, a right to make a national inquiry'? 18th-century governments thought not and neither did the newspapers’ readers of the time.

Dunia Garcia-Ontiveros explores the life and work of Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia, one of the less fortunate and most cantankerous polymaths of the Italian Renaissance.

John Swinfield describes the bizarre politics behind the British government’s attempt to launch a pair of airships in the 1920s and how a project that might have boosted national pride ended in tragedy and failure.

The Hindenburg disaster marked the beginning of the end for airship travel. Yet what is often forgotten today is that, until the 1930s, airships were a popular and luxurious way to travel.

Richard Cavendish describes the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary on May 27th, 1936.

Richard Cavendish remembers the death of Ivan Pavlov on February 27th, 1936.

To conclude his series on the opportunities offered to historians by new technology, Nick Poyntz looks at how recent developments may help to bridge the gap between academic and public history.

The Royal Society was founded in 1660 to promote scientific research. Through a process of trial and error, this completely new kind of institution slowly discovered how its ambitions might be achieved – often in ways unforeseen by its founders, writes Michael Hunter.

Though they originated in China, it was in the capitals of early modern Europe that fireworks flourished. They united art and science in awesome displays of poltical might, as Simon Werrett explains.

John Etty shows the vital importance of aviation in the Stalinist Soviet Union.